I read and ignored it because when I see people making claims like this it sounds conspiratorial. You have been here a while, though, so I’ll assume you know how the rank algorithm works, in which case I would say that the flame war detector you’re describing is the more likely explanation. There were six top-level comments flagged dead when I opened the thread.

These kinds of threads hit the front page every day, though, so I don’t get why people act upset that they get flagged when 90% of them don’t belong here.